The Inquisitor’s face was hidden beneath the smooth upturned lines of his breather, but Daichi could swear the little man was smiling.
“To see what your faith has brought you.”
*
In the end, they carried him.
One under each shoulder, the short one leading, up onto the deck. The skies were filled with ironclads, sleek, arrowhead corvettes cutting exhaust streaks across the sky. Daichi squinted, the dawn much too bright after days below. A storm was amassed to the north, the distant Iishi hidden by a curtain of black rain.
They propped him at the railing, holding his arms. The air overflowed with the burned-flower stink of chi, engine song, a choir of propeller blades. To the west he could see the Tōnan mountains, the cancer-black smear of the Stain spreading around their roots far below. Fumes hung over massive fissures in dead earth, little farms on the periphery being swallowed one foot at a time. And out there on the eastern edge, behind a perimeter of railway lines and barbed wire fences and a hundred shreddermen suits lined up all in a row, a giant stirred.
Black iron. Great foglamp eyes illuminating the blanket of smoke. Three hundred feet high, eight legs curled up under a bloated, rivet-studded belly; the limbs of some ancient spider god dredged up from the hells. Exhaust spires down its spine, great scythe arms edged with chainsaw blades big enough to level forests as if they were built from straw and dreams. The Guild’s monster. Its masterpiece. Ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
Earthcrusher.
Daichi stifled a coughing fit, blinking fumes and tears from his eyes. Off at the distant Midland junction, he could see troop transports, banners flapping, blades glittering like breakers on an iron-gray sea. The Tiger lord’s warhost, set to crush the Kagé into dust.
The shreddermen below started their engines; a hundred-strong choir of sawblade arms and tree-trunk legs, crewed by Tiger pilots. An army of flesh and sharpened steel.
Gods, what could we have ever hoped to throw against it?
He looked to the Tiger flagship Honorable Death, floating off the starboard. A sharp intake of breath as he saw him, clad in new brass, eyes burning like hellsfire through the exhaust.
Staring right at him.
Kin-san.
He wished with everything inside him for five minutes alone with that boy in a windowless room. A few quiet words he would give his life to hiss.
But no. Trust had put paid to that ending long ago. Trust repaid with lightless cells and torture, ending here on these two ships, a few dozen feet and a thousand miles apart. They stared at each other, a bitter, vengeful wind moaning across the gulf between them. Staring until the skies split with a thunderous roar, a belching, crunching, clanking rumble felt from the tip of his spine to the base of his skull.
The engines of the Earthcrusher.
The Inquisitors lurked beside him, silent and still. Daichi realized it was freezing, thin air scraping his ravaged throat, but the trio seemed not to notice. They stood looking out over the Stain and the unfurling army, slow exhalations of blue-black breath lost amidst the exhaust.
The Earthcrusher spewed poison plumes a mile high, a jetwash of spattering tar, the garish oranges and yellows of the Phoenix Fleet nearly lost amidst the cloud. The very sky shook as it bellowed, deck vibrating beneath Daichi’s feet, two vast foglamp eyes cutting through the pall.
The lead Inquisitor turned to the old man, a smile in bloodshot eyes.
“Where is your Maker now?”
*
Kin climbed over the Honorable Death’s railing, and without a word, dropped into smoke-washed skies. Gravity clutching, velocity caressing his skin as he sailed belly down into the void, wind roaring in his ears.
The Stain stretched out below; a great tumor of ash and cracks torn through Shima’s heart. The fumes blanketing the dead earth barely moved despite the prop-blasts from above. Kin closed his eyes as he descended, wondering if he would feel it when he struck the ground.
He worked at switches on his wrist, and the engines on his back roared to life, snatching him from gravity’s embrace. He swooped under the fleet’s belly, half a dozen Artificers flying with him—the team from Kigen sent to complete the Earthcrusher’s crew.